The Hidden World (A Princess of Roumania)

by Paul Park

  Bocu had used the threat of war and then the war itself to justify his political position, which was unforgiveable. Doubtless he was an evil man, and doubtless the white tyger could find a way to destroy him, which was what Aegypta Schenck would have wanted or advised—doubtless, except Miranda was full of doubts. Destroying the wicked never seemed to change the world.

  In the misty pasture Miranda paused and let the dogs come to her. It was easy for these subjects, important as they were, to disappear into abstraction. She scanned the treetops, moisture on her face, worrying instead about Peter in the trenches and Andromeda wherever she was—these political issues were too hard to make real, except through the experience of people you cared about. They were her friends from Massachusetts, however much they had been battered and transformed. Without them she was abandoned, lost. But everybody had to break free, finally. Wasn’t that what her aunt had said?

  Aegypta Schenck had made no provision for Pieter de Graz and Sasha Prochenko, wasted no thought on what might happen to them once their purpose was accomplished. Now they had limped home: Peter Gross, Pieter de Graz, the ape and the scarlet bug. Prochenko, Andromeda, and the yellow dog. They had suffered for Miranda’s sake. So maybe it was her duty to worry about them. And maybe that duty was as strong as what she owed to Great Roumania.

  The mist hung round her at the top of the meadow. The dogs barged out of it and into it again. The house was out of sight. Miranda touched the golden bracelet at her wrist, and then she closed her eyes. In her mind she reached down and searched among the stones for the jewel, the tourmaline, her entry to the hidden world. The last time she had come this way, she had wrapped it in a sock and left it in a secure place, marked by a rock cairn. Now she found it and unwrapped it and held it in her hand. What had her aunt said about Berkshire County, Massachusetts, America? “You might search for it and find it in the hidden world. You might find it with the tools I’ve given you.” The bright sun broke over her and drove the mist away.

  Miranda was in a high meadow on a high mountain slope. She stood in the grass around her knees. It was springtime, and morning time, and the birds were singing. A brandywine bird was hidden in the grass. She knew its song. And above her she saw a big butterfly that was floating down, flapping wearily as if it had traveled a long way.

  What a lovely spot! The sun was shining over the rock peaks. She had no doubt that in the grass with her, hidden there or maybe in that stand of birches, she would find the dog, the ape, the bug. They would share all this together and all danger, too.

  As if conjured by the word, as she pushed through the grass she saw where it came to an end at a sort of a cliff. Below her the ground had been scooped out, a wound in the red and black earth. Smells came from it, a garbage dump here in this beautiful place, an uncovered pit that was so big she couldn’t see the end of it. And there was movement down there in the garbage, a multitude of animals and creatures in a dump that receded into darkness as she looked.

  Peter Gross was in the trenches in Staro Selo—God, she couldn’t stand it. She laid down the jewel and the world shuddered to life again, the real world where she stood above Stanesti-Jui. But there too the sun had broken through a cleft in the high peaks. There too the mist had cleared, and she could see the town with its little railway station and the temple of Demeter with its turnip dome. She could see the farmhouse down below.

  The dogs came to her and licked her hands, then ran off again. For several minutes she stood immobile on the slope. She remembered climbing up here with Andromeda the year before, after she’d escaped from Nicola Ceausescu and the People’s Palace. It was one of the first mornings, and they had walked through the barley fields behind the house, then up the slope. In this same meadow they had looked down at the black-and-green farmhouse and the slate-roofed village around the temple, the railway and the road.

  “Sort of takes you back,” Andromeda had said in English.

  At moments as they climbed, Miranda had been struck by how easy this felt, just like walking to school over Christmas Hill. At other times Andromeda seemed a stranger to her, untiring, unsweating, though she always kept her mouth open and spat from time to time into the grass. They scarcely spoke. Moment by moment it was as if they passed through alternating currents of familiarity and strangeness. Dressed in the same black suit and creamy linen for two days, Andromeda still looked stylish and well groomed. How beautiful she was, Miranda thought, not for the first time. Her skin seemed to glow, an effect of the morning sunlight in the fine, golden hair that seemed to cover her. Her teeth were white and shiny, disconcertingly large. She let her tongue loll out, then touched her lips. Nor did it matter if she was really someone else, some cavalry lieutenant or whatever. People were what they were. Everyone was a zoo inside if you could just scrape off the skin.

  She’d left that evening or the next evening to take the night train back to Bucharest. “À bientôt,” she’d said when the carriage came to the door. One thing Miranda had not discussed with her was Peter Gross or Pieter de Graz, and her feelings for one or both of them.

  Now, alone with the dogs running back and forth, she remembered what he had looked like in the gazebo by the lake in the park under the plum-colored sky, the last time she had seen him. Nor did she understand, still, why they had had to separate, except because he’d wanted to. It was his choice, his decision. She had assumed he’d stay with her, and something would change, and they would … touch each other as they’d touched each other in the palace cell where they were prisoners. And that would be all right and even normal in some way, like something that was supposed to happen all along.

  And she would feel—what? All she could see now was his dirty, brooding face, marked along his cheek with scabs or abrasions and made unfamiliar by the lantern’s oblique glare in the little brick gazebo in the park. Certainly in her mind’s eye he looked threatening and unappealing. But maybe that was normal too under the circumstances; who knew what normal was? This landscape of feelings, this really was the hidden world, stranger than a mountaintop or garbage pit. And she was no white tyger in that landscape, that was sure. This stuff had always made her crazy. Always she’d been hesitant and insecure. The boldest thing she’d ever done was to go up to Peter Gross beside the icehouse in the woods. And that was only possible because she’d pitied him and couldn’t conceive of anything happening between them. How wrong she’d been!

  2

  Staro Selo

  ON FRIDAY EVENINGS the officers lit candles in the dugouts. From the Roumanian trenches you could see the glow. At sunset the Turkish guns would fall silent along the southern front from Balcik to Kula, a distance of four hundred kilometers.

  General Antonescu and the Roumanian high command had thought at first to take advantage of the superstition of the enemy. They had begun several big assaults on Saturday mornings, especially in the sectors closest to the river. Interrupted in their meditations, the Turks had fought with murderous fury. Later the Roumanians, superstitious in their turn, would not budge from their positions for the entire Sabbath, fearful of the wrath, as they imagined, of an indignant God.

  This became the routine in the first season of the war, a day of respite at the end of every week. The bombardments would stop on both sides of the line, and the men would climb out of the trenches with ringing ears. They would repair their works, search in the barbed wire and cold mud for the bodies of their friends. At dusk on Saturday the guns would open up, hesitant at first, just a few green flares and tracers taking range, and then it all would begin again.

  One Friday night in March, a man stood in the communication trench behind a quiet section of the line. This was south of the town of Staro Selo, where there was a supply depot and a military hospital, as well as the battalion headquarters.

  The man, a platoon leader from Theta Company, was not typical, because he had risen from the ranks. In the winter he had served first as a private soldier, later as an NCO. But during the most recent counterattack, the El
eventh Mountain Battalion had lost seventeen of its junior officers. The man had been promoted in the field to acting brevet captain, a rank that had not yet been either reconsidered or confirmed.

  He was atypical in another way. His right hand had been amputated at the middle of his forearm, forcing him to wear a prosthetic steel hook, buckled with leather straps to the stump of his arm. This injury had preceded the beginning of the war, which made his presence in the army a cause for speculation. But as he had explained, an ape could have enlisted in the battalion during the first Turkish advance. No questions would have been asked.

  The captain was a handsome man with curly brown hair and big, widely spaced white teeth. His name was Peter Gross. Now he stood listening in the deserted trench, a clean one, cut back and forth in a corkscrew pattern a hundred and fifty meters from the support lines. The telephone wires were fastened to the walls or else held safely overhead. The drainage sumps were marked in white and full of tiny frogs. Underfoot, the mud was dry.

  Three weeks earlier the enemy had attacked under a creeping barrage, had driven the men back to the support trenches, almost to the town. But the Turks had not been able to sustain their progress. Isolated in their turn by the Roumanian artillery, caught in fortifications they themselves had blown to pieces, and which in any case were facing the wrong way, they withdrew. After two days of fighting, both armies had collapsed into their previous positions. The Eleventh Brasov Mountaineers, responsible for this section of the line, had lost almost five hundred men in forty-eight hours, most during the initial bombardment. Many had been buried alive.

  Now, after a period of inactivity, it was as if none of that had ever occurred. The trench ran straight and clean. The world was peaceful in the overcast, misty night. The captain was almost invisible. He stood unnoticed in an angle of the wall, listening to the cheeping frogs. It was as if the entire battlefront were deserted, or else patrolled by ghosts.

  Tomorrow the communication trenches would be full of soldiers bringing up supplies under shelter of the truce. Tonight, because of the impossibility of an attack, the discipline on this part of the line had been relaxed. The company commander, a martinet during the week, was on his twenty-four-hour bender. A line of light slid from the bottom of the dugout’s corrugated iron door. The men were playing cards. Behind the captain on the slope, the machine-gun posts were empty. Covered in their tarpaulins and rubber capes, the men snored in their shelters, cut into the trench’s inner wall.

  Nothing stirred. There would be observers in the listening posts. Captain Gross stepped across to the traverse, a sandbagged buttress reinforced with timber at the level of his head. He climbed onto the fire steps and looked over the parapet. Nothing.

  No time like the present. He put his hand over his heart so he could feel the outline of the envelope he kept there, tucked under his shirt—a ritual in these moments. He clambered up the stepladder over the top.

  Then he was crawling on his belly over crusts of broken earth. After fifty meters he rose to his hand and knees.

  The Turks had fortified positions in a wheat field, beyond the remains of a dirt road and a shattered line of trees. The land between the armies was a tormented strip of earth, in some places no more than a hundred meters wide. Peter Gross was interested in poetry, and at dangerous moments he would surrender to the poetical part of himself in order to achieve a kind of discipline. Tonight this no-man’s-land was like a river to him, and he imagined a cold, furious stream that flowed down from the mountains to the sea, a metaphoric likeness to the Danube ten kilometers behind him, the border to Roumania, toward which the army now retreated in bloody fits and starts.

  Now that he had left the trench, he could smell the river on the night wind. On his hand and knees in the stiff dirt, he imagined the silent torrent all around him. The land was more like water than earth, carved ridges of mud and circular depressions—whirlpools of stinking garbage. Surely now in March the snows were melting in the high mountains, and in the Vulcan Mountains near Stanesti-Jui. Surely there was snow in the mountains where Miranda lived, away from all this. Now the spring rains had brought a devastating flood, had washed away boots and hats and pieces of buildings. People, too.

  Here the stream broadened as it met the plain. It stretched half a kilometer to the flickering candles on the far bank. Here especially there were mounds of detritus: clumps of grass and straw, timbers, broken trees, all stitched together in ubiquitous barbed wire, which held the flotsam, he thought, like an abandoned fishing net.

  Out of sight from both banks of the stream, he clambered to his feet. He recognized the place. He stood on the lip of a small dell, an oak tree in the middle. This was the exact location.

  All was quiet here, as in the trenches. But there was no truce in no-man’s-land, the broken strip of earth between the armies. Under cover of darkness, faces blackened with soot, Turks and Roumanians would patrol this ground, looking for their wounded and taking prisoners.

  On Wednesday night Peter had taken six men on patrol. Past midnight they had encountered a Turkish wiring detail. One man was missing when they returned to the line, a farmer’s son named Costache, eighteen years old. Peter had gone out again with two volunteers but had found nothing. The boy must have gotten lost; several hundred meters to the left of Theta Company’s positions, someone was shot by snipers climbing back. He shouted in Roumanian, but by that time the sun had risen.

  On Thursday they had listened to him calling out for water. On Thursday night Peter had tried to find him with the same two men, but they had been roughed up. Now, today, the boy hadn’t made another sound. And Theta Company was pulled back in reserve. Even though it was Friday night and the guns were quiet, the company commander had refused permission for another attempt.

  So Peter had had to come up the communications trench and try from another section of the line. It was easy to get lost. He recognized this tree. This was where they’d seen the Turks two nights before. Pistols and knives in the darkness for about a minute. That was all they could manage so close to the line. What a stupid waste.

  All of a sudden it seemed crazy to him that he should think he’d find the boy alive, or even the boy’s body—what could he do? There was no one here.

  It hadn’t rained for almost a week, and that was hopeful, wasn’t it? Spring was coming; he could smell the spring. This was the Bulgar country, famous for its fogs. As he climbed from the dell, he saw he was closer to the Turkish lines than he had thought. No more than seventy meters. He could see the candles glimmer in the mist. He wiped his face and found it wet. A wet wind from the river and the marsh. Moisture glistened on his sleeve.

  So it was good to have the candles as a point of reference. He put his back to them and picked his way over the wounded, pockmarked, cratered ground. He had a pair of clippers in his pocket, and he often had to stop to cut through the wire. It sagged from metal stakes that screwed into the earth—an African invention, he had heard.

  He was moving toward a lantern burning in the lines, which indicated the Roumanian latrines. It and the corresponding Turkish light were never shelled, by mutual and silent understanding. Now it flickered in the mist, flickered and went out.

  But the distances were short. It was important to find the right section of the trench, the right traverse. Omega Company held two hundred meters of the front. The CO was notorious for his laxness on Friday nights. And Peter knew some of the men.

  He muttered a curse in the English language—had they blown out the lantern? Or was it hidden in the mist, which might still rise? All was in darkness, and he could feel the warm wind on his face. Behind him the Sabbath candles had gone out.

  The barbed wire was around his waist. He sank to his knees, then pulled himself forward into a shallow crater. Without the light from the latrine, it was useless to blunder forward—should he wait for dawn? No, even before dawn the trenches would be full of men. Darkness was his only chance to get back to his tent unnoticed.

  And so
he crept forward into holes punched out of the earth by the crashing howitzers, the whining 75s. Many of them contained corpses, slimy or half eaten by the rats. What was the point of searching for one corpse among the thousands who had died here? Was it because of his own vanity, his reputation on the line? When the darkness cleared a little bit and he could see his reference lights, he would give up and go back.

  He paused, lifted up his head. Why did he find it necessary to disregard his senior officers? Was he was hoping for some kind of wound or punishment, so he could escape this place? Or was he trying to punish himself, maybe, and to forget how he had left Miranda Popescu in Cismigiu Park in Bucharest, abandoned a duty as clear as anything in Staro Selo? Otherwise he would think about her all night long.

  He had abandoned her. Now he was stuck here in the mud, trapped with a hundred thousand others. And there was nothing to be done, and so he continued onward on his hand and knees, because he was quite sure he was in the area where Costache had been hit. He was moving parallel to the trench, as far as he could judge. Here was a deep, broken shell hole, and he could smell the water at the bottom. Here he found his man, lying on his back at the top of the crater, asleep, unconscious, dead—he put his hand on his shoulder. He whispered in his ear.

  And he was alive—he came awake and would have shouted, only Peter put his hand over his mouth. He was struggling as Peter pinned him, held him down with his right elbow on his neck, the steel hook in his face. Why, if he had this much strength, had he not called out to the men in the listening post so they could bring him in? And so Peter knew immediately this wasn’t his boy at all—his hair was tight and curly, close to his scalp.